1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus and an image forming information processing apparatus that can form images having a lamé effect in an image forming process using toner.
2. Description of the Background Art
The printing field includes special printing techniques such as pearl metallic printing, hologram printing, lamé printing, flexo printing, decomat printing, and scratch printing. Such special printing may use special ink, prepared by mixing special material, to create special visual effects. In the image forming process using electrophotography, visual effects created by such special printing can be devised by mixing in metal pieces, thin scale pieces, or scale-like pigments as colorants of the toner used for image forming. However, such special-materials-mixed toner is difficult to use because the electrophotographic image forming process, which uses static electricity, sets some limits on the properties of the toner and coloring agents, such as toner size and chargeability.
Lamé printing, which is one type of special printing, forms lamé images having a visual effect such as sporadic presence of glittering particles. If such lamé images are formed by electrophotography, the toner is required to include particles such as synthetic mica. However, such synthetic-mica-mixed toner is difficult to use in the electrophotographic image forming process because of the above-described limitations on the properties of the toner and coloring agents.
JP-4535112-B discloses a technique for forming metallic images using transparent toner instead of metal pieces or the like. In particular, JP-4535112-B discloses: grayscale values of pixels in the area used for forming metallic images are changed; color images are formed based on the changed grayscale values; and transparent toner is superimposed on the color images to form transparent images; then the metallic images are formed. Accordingly, the hue of the images does not change much and a metallic image effect can be achieved. However, a lamé image effect such as glittering particles cannot be achieved. Moreover, in JP-4535112-B, the fact that the transparent toner coats the entire area of the metallic images also prevents a lamé image from being achieved.
JP-2001-175022-A discloses a technique of using transparent toner having a melt viscosity set smaller than a melt viscosity of colored toner to form high quality images. However, although JP-2001-175022-A discloses the transparent toner, it does not disclose formation of special images such as lamé images.